Rising fuel costs have increased the cost of air travel and caused airlines to cut costs and seek new revenue streams in order to achieve profitability. For example, most airlines have stopped providing free meals to passengers and instead sell snacks, meals, and beverages. Airlines add fuel surcharges to ticket prices and charge travelers extra for checking luggage and for aisle or window seats. Many of these new profitability measures, and especially the checked baggage charge, have been unpopular with air travelers.
Conducting market and product research is often costly, inefficient, intrusive, and largely a negative experience for participants and product brands. Consumers dislike telemarketers calling their homes. Mail surveys are lengthy, cumbersome, boring and easily disregarded by recipients. Over time, response rates to mail and telemarketer surveys have eroded. Conducting face to face focus groups is highly costly and time consuming. Conducting a face to face survey requires identifying willing participants for the study and then compensating participants. Conducting market and product research on-line was supposed to avoid the problems with mail, telemarketer, and face to face research. Foremost, on-line research can be conducted quickly and inexpensively. However, results from on-line surveys often do not replicate against the same on-line survey or surveys conducted using other methodology. The lack of replication casts doubts on the reliability, validity, and veracity of on-line surveys.